A STORY little told is
that of Jews in Hollywood's seedier
cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps
we'd prefer to pretend that the
'triple-exthnics' didn't exist, but
there's no getting away from the fact that
secular Jews have played (and still
continue to play) a disproportionate role
throughout the adult film industry in
America.

Jewish involvement in pornography has a
long history in the United States, as Jews
have helped to transform a fringe
subculture into what has become a primary
constituent of Americana. These are the
'true blue Jews'

Smut
peddlers

Jewish activity in the porn industry
divides into two (sometimes overlapping)
groups: pornographers and performers.
Though Jews make up only two per cent of
the American population, they have been
prominent in pornography. Many erotica
dealers in the book trade between 1890 and
1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin.
According to Jay A. Gertzman, author of
Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in
Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999),
'Jews were prominent in the distribution
of gallantiana [fiction on erotic
themes and books of dirty jokes and
ballads], avant-garde sexually
explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and
flagitious materials.'

In the postwar era, America's most
notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman,
the 'Walt Disney of Porn' According to the
US Department of Justice, throughout the
1970s Sturman controlled most of the
pornography circulating in the country.
Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in
Cleveland's East Side. Initially, he sold
comics and magazines, but when he realized
sex magazines produced twenty times the
revenue of comic books, he moved
exclusively into porn, eventually
producing his own titles and setting up
retail stores. By the end of the 1960s,
Sturman ranked at the top of adult
magazine distributors and by the mid-70s
he owned over 200 adult bookstores.
Sturman also introduced updated versions
of the traditional peepshow booth
(typically a dark room with a small colour
TV on which the viewer can view X-rated
videos). It was said that Sturman did not
simply control the adult-entertainment
industry; he was the industry. Eventually
he was convicted of tax evasion and other
crimes and died, disgraced, in prison in
1997. His son, David, continued running
the family business.

The contemporary incarnation of Sturman
is 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander Steven
Hirsch, who has been described as 'the
Donald Trump of porno.' The link between
the two is Steve's father, Fred, who was a
stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman.
Today Hirsch runs the Vivid Entertainment
Group, which has been called the Microsoft
of the porn world, the top producer of
'adult.' films in the US. His specialty
was to import mainstream marketing
techniques into the porn business. Indeed,
Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio
system of the 1930s and 1940s,
particularly in its exclusive contracts to
porn stars who are hired and moulded by
Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a
behind-the-scenes reality TV show recently
broadcast on Channel 4.

Nice
Jewish girls and boys

Jews accounted for most of the leading
male performers as well as a sizeable
number of female stars in porn movies of
the 1970s and 80s. The doyen of the Hebrew
studs is Ron Jeremy. Known in the trade as
'the Hedgehog' Jeremy is one of America's
biggest porn stars. The 51-year-old Jeremy
was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish
family in Flushing, Queens, and has since
appeared in more than 1,600 adult movies,
as well as directing over 100. Jeremy has
achieved iconic status in America, a hero
to males of all ages, Jewish and gentile
alike - he's the nebbischy, fat, hairy,
ugly guy who gets to bed dozens of
beautiful women. He presents an image of a
modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud
who supersedes the traditional heroes of
Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud scholar he.
His stature was recently cemented with the
release of a pornomentary about his life,
Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As
probably the most famous Jewish male porn
star, Jeremy has done wonders for the
psyche of Jewish men in America. Jeremy
has also just released a compilation CD,
Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy. For 9.99
(including delivery), the lucky listener
gets to enjoy Jeremy's hand-picked
favourite porno grooves along with
narration by 'the legend' himself. As the
publicity blurb gushes, 'Out of the brown
paper wrappings and into the
mainstream.'

Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is
everything that Jeremy is not: young,
handsome and toned. Glasser, a 39-year-old
New York Jew, opened a gym in 1991 in Los
Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a
video camera for 24 hours, went to a
nearby strip club, recruited a woman, then
headed back to his gym and started
shooting. Although the movie stank, with a
bit of chutzpah and a few business cards
he wangled a deal with a manufacturer and
started cranking out films. Within a few
years, 'Seymore Butts,' his nom de porn
which is simultaneously his sales pitch,
became one of the largest franchises in
the adult-film business. As the king of
the gonzo genre (marked by handheld
cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a
low-tech aesthetic meant to suggest
reality), he is today probably the most
famous Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc.,
his production company, releases about 36
films annually, most of them shot for less
than $15,000, each of them grossing more
than 10 times that sum. Glasser employs 12
people, including his mother and cousin
Stevie as respectively genial company
accountant (and matchmaker for her single
son) and lovable but roguish general
gopher. Glasser currently even has his own
reality TV show (also broadcast on Channel
4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family
Business, whose opening credits show
Glasser's barmitzvah photo.

In
search of a buck

Jews became involved in the porn
industry for much the same reasons that
their co-religionists became involved in
Hollywood. They were attracted to an
industry primarily because it admitted
them. Its newness meant that restrictive
barriers had not yet been erected, as they
had in so many other areas of American
life. In porn, there was no discrimination
against Jews. During the early part of the
twentieth century, an entrepreneur did not
require large sums of money to make a
start in the film business; cinema was
considered a passing fad. In the porn
business, it was similarly straightforward
to get going. To show 'stag.' movies or
loops, as they were known, all one needed
was a projector, screen and a few chairs.
Not tied up with the status quo and with
nothing to lose by innovation, Jews were
open to new ways of doing business.
Gertzman explains that

"Jews, when they found
themselves excluded from a field of
endeavour, turned to a profession in
which they sensed they could eventually
thrive by cooperating with colleagues
in a community of effort . . . Jews
have for a very long time cultivated
the temperament and talents of
middlemen, and they are proud of these
abilities".

The adult entertainment business
required something that Jews possessed in
abundance: chutzpah. Early Jewish
pornographers were marketing geniuses and
ambitious entrepreneurs whose toughness,
intelligence and boundless self-confidence
were responsible for their successes.

Of course, the large number of Jews in
porn were mainly motivated by the desire
to make profits. Just as their
counterparts in Hollywood provided a dream
factory for Americans, a blank screen upon
which the Jewish moguls.' visions of
America could be created and projected, so
the porn-moguls displayed a talent for
understanding public tastes. What better
way to provide the stuff of dreams and
fantasies than through the
adult-entertainment industry? Performers
did porn for the money. As ADL National
Director Abraham H. Foxman commented,
'Those Jews who enter the pornography
industry have done so as individuals
pursuing the American dream..'

Secular
sex

Like their mainstream counterparts,
Jews who enter porn do not usually do so
as representatives of their religious
group. Most of the performers and
pornographers are Jewish culturally but
not religiously. Many are entirely
secular, Jews in name only. Sturman,
however, identified as a Jew - he was a
generous donator to Jewish charities - and
performer Richard Pacheco once interviewed
to be a rabbinical student.

Very few, if any, porn films have
overtly Jewish themes, although Jeremy
once tried to get several Jewish porn
stars together to make a kosher porn film.
The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes,
in which Nina Hartley plays a sexually
insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex
with anyone who rings the doorbell. It has
sold very well, spawned a couple of
sequels and is currently very hard to buy
- perhaps indicating a new niche to
exploit. Indeed, according to an editorial
on the World Union of Jewish Students
website,

"there are thousands of people
searching for Jewish porn. After things
like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles,
Jewish dating, and Jewish festivals
comes 'Jewish porn.' in the list of top
search keywords that GoTo.com provide".

Sexual
rebels

Is there a deeper reason, beyond the
mere financial, as to why Jews in
particular have become involved in porn?
There is surely an element of rebellion in
Jewish X-rated involvement. Its very taboo
and forbidden nature serves to make it
attractive. As I written in these pages
before, treyf signifies 'the whole world
of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of
the goyim, and there all the delights are
imagined to lie . . ..' ('Reel Kashrut:
Jewish food in film.' JQ 189 [Spring
2003]).

According to one anonymous industry
insider quoted by E. Michael Jones in the
magazine Culture Wars (May 2003), 'the
leading male performers through the 1980s
came from secular Jewish upbringings and
the females from Roman Catholic day
schools.' The standard porn scenario
became as a result a Jewish fantasy of
schtupping the Catholic shiksa.

Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and porn
gossipmonger Luke Ford explains on his
website (lukeford.net): 'Porn is just one
expression of [the] rebellion
against standards, against the disciplined
life of obedience to Torah that marks a
Jew living Judaism..' It is also a revolt
against (often middle-class) parents who
wish their children to be lawyers, doctors
and accountants. As performer Bobby Astyr
put it on the same website, 'It's an "up
yours" to the uncles with the pinky rings
who got down on me as a kid for wanting to
be musician..'

As religious influences waned and were
replaced by secular ones, free-thinking
Jews, especially those from California's
Bay Area, viewed sex as a means of
personal and political liberation. America
provided the freest society Jews have ever
known, as manifested by the growth of the
adult industry. Those Jewish women who
have sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp
contradiction to the stereotype of the
'Jewish American Princess.' They (and I'm
speculating here) may have seen themselves
as fulfilling the promise of liberation,
emancipating themselves from what feminist
Betty Friedan in 1963 called the
'comfortable concentration camp.' of the
household as they set out into the
Promised Land of the porno sets of
Southern California. It signified their
economic and social freedom: they were
free to choose to enter, rather than
coerced into it by economic and other
circumstances. Once they had lain down,
they could stand on their own two feet,
particularly as female performers
typically earn twice as much as their male
counterparts.

Sexual
revolutionaries

Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish
involvement in the X-rated industry can be
seen as a proverbial two fingers to the
entire WASP establishment in America. Some
porn stars viewed themselves as frontline
fighters in the spiritual battle between
Christian America and secular humanism.
According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors
often brag about their 'joy in being
anarchic, sexual gadflies to the
puritanical beast.' Jewish involvement in
porn, by this argument, is the result of
an atavistic hatred of Christian
authority: they are trying to weaken the
dominant culture in America by moral
subversion. Astyr remembers having 'to run
or fight for it in grammar school because
I was a Jew. It could very well be that
part of my porn career is an "up yours" to
these people.' Al Goldstein, the publisher
of Screw, said (on lukeford.net), 'The
only reason that Jews are in pornography
is that we think that Christ sucks.
Catholicism sucks. We don't believe in
authoritarianism..' Pornography thus
becomes a way of defiling Christian
culture and, as it penetrates to the very
heart of the American mainstream (and is
no doubt consumed by those very same
WASPs), its subversive character becomes
more charged. Porn is no longer of the
'what the Butler saw.' voyeuristic type;
instead, it is driven to new extremes of
portrayal that stretch the boundaries of
the porn aesthetic. As new sexual
positions are portrayed, the desire to
shock (as well as entertain) seems
clear.

It is a case of the traditional
revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant
Jews in America being channelled into
sexual rather than leftist politics. Just
as Jews have been disproportionately
represented in radical movements over the
years, so they are also disproportionately
represented in the porn industry. Jews in
America have been sexual revolutionaries.
A large amount of the material on sexual
liberation was written by Jews. Those at
the forefront of the movement which forced
America to adopt a more liberal view of
sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the
vanguard of the sexual revolution of the
1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and
Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and
Lenin as required revolutionary reading.
Reich's central preoccupations were work,
love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied
that a socialist utopia would free
individuals to achieve sexual
satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the
'beautiful cultural consequences.' that
would follow from legalizing pornography:
it would 'ennoble all our art' and
'humanize sexuality' Pacheco was one
Jewish porn star who read Reich's
intellectual marriage of Freud and Marx
(lukeford.net):

"Before I got my first part in
an adult film, I went down to an
audition for an X-rated film with my
hair down to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm
Reich's Sexual Revolution under my arm
and yelling about work, 'love and
sex'."

As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put it (E.
Michael Jones, 'Rabbi Dresner's Dilemma:
Torah v. Ethnos' Culture Wars, May 2003),
'Jewish rebellion has broken out on
several levels' one being 'the prominent
role of Jews as advocates to sexual
experimentation.' Overall, then, porn
performers are a group of people who
praise rebellion, self-fulfilment and
promiscuity.

What
are we ashamed of?

This brief overview and analysis of the
role and motivations behind pornographers
and performers is intended to shed light
on a neglected topic in American Jewish
popular culture. Little has been written
about it. Books such as Howard M. Sachar's
A History of the Jews in America (New
York: Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the
topic. And you can bet that the 350th
anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in
the United States did not include any
celebrations of Jewish innovation in this
field. Even the usually tolerant Time Out
New York has been too prim to deal with
it, although the more iconoclastic Heeb
plans an issue on it. In light of the
relatively tolerant Jewish view of sex,
why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in
the porn industry? We might not like it,
but the Jewish role in this field has been
significant and it is about time it was
written about seriously.

Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer
in Modern American History at the
University of Aberdeen. He has just
completed a book on neo-conservatism in
the United States.